My Teachers

Let me speak of Denise
and Creeley
and Robert Duncan.  They

were my teachers
when Manhattan lay before me
an indecipherable riddle, day and

night the weaving
traffic of its implacability
in which I found them, somehow,

their solace and promise.  Denise
on the back of With Eyes at
the Back of Our Heads, gap-toothed

yet romantic, a rosy-skinned
English girl, the complexion of her
early imagist equations where

landscape equals some
law of human pertinence.  Now
in Breathing the Water, she

does it even better.  Creeley,
the one-eyed, who gave me
a vision of sobriety that

held in the Manhattan riot
of extremes:  simply a man
without a patch

being himself the way
my schoolmate Ken Axelson
stood at the bus stop with no

overcoat while it snowed
one morning.
I always admired

the least exuberant that
yet contained life.  Like Morandi.
No apology for a lack

of show.  But Duncan, ah
Duncan could be dramatic,
his verbal tapestries

redolent of medieval
incense, the hush and
sudden exclamation in

stretches of vowels
and consonants that stirred
the heart with a muscular

succession of attentions.  These
three gave me myself
in a city that might

have swept me
away; they pronounced
my fate as I

read them, up late
above the all-night traffic
on the West Side Drive.